This email continues the theme I introduced with How Obama's Rhetoric Reinforces America's Grand Strategic Pathway to Catastrophe.
Attached beneath my introduction is an brilliant essay, The Dangerous Neocon-R2P Alliance, written by Robert Parry of Consortium News. Parry describes how propaganda produced by this domestic alliance of convenience among a non-representative minority of unelected influence peddlers is fueling America's rush to a new Cold War with Russia.
Introduction
There is nothing new, per se, in the domestic politics fueling this rush to war. During the height of the Cold War war, however, it was routine for American politicians and analysts calling for higher defense budgets to claim that foreign policy was broadly bipartisan — i.e., that domestic politics stopped at the waters edge and the United States had a bi-partisan foreign policy.
Of course, the claim that domestic politics stopped at the water edge is patent nonsense. Nevertheless, maintaining the popular fiction became a central prop in the domestic politics of fear used by the pol-mil apparat to suppress opponents of increased defense spending. This was especially true during periods of economic ‘austerity,' when maintaining high defense budgets required cutbacks in spending for social programs, like infrastructure modernization (bridges, sewers, schools, etc) or those aimed at social welfare, especially those programs for poverty relief, medical coverage, or social social security.
In thinking through the implications of Parry's analysis, it is important to remember that a nation's foreign policy is always a reflection of its domestic politics. This is especially the case for democracies. President Eisenhower's warning about the dangers posed by the Military – Industrial (and I would add Congressional) Complex (or MICC) illustrates this point: Was not his warning precisely about the danger posed by the rise of misplaced domestic political power accruing to those parts of the federal government and private economic sector that benefited from high levels of defense spending? Today, a whole cottage industry of think tanks and media outlets is organized around the requirement to produce the propaganda needed to prop up that misplaced power.
